thuja again

I realise this stuff may be quite a specific obsession of mine but I'm still very intrigued by the migration of the ancient term thuja from the plant it originally designated to a genus that isn't represented in Europe or Africa at all. The Oxford English Dictionary supplies a scrap of information about when the white cedar first received the name thuja:

Camerarius, 1577, has thya from Pliny and thuia after Gaza; he applies the name to the American Arbor Vitæ, Thuya occidentalis.

I think this must be a reference to a German botanist called Joachim Camerarius the younger (1534-1598) and, since Cartier's attention was only drawn to the white cedar in the 1530s, the text mentioned here - whatever it is - is very early. However, although I've cast about a bit to see if I can locate something that Camerarius published in 1577, I've drawn a blank. So, I've written to the enquiries department at the OED to ask if they have a fuller reference. (Maybe this *is* becoming a bit obsessive!)

ameda/annedda

It seems that ameda has many variant spellings: anneda, annedda, and hanneda. I'm not sure where these appear - I've just seen them cited in the secondary literature (e.g. an article by C. Stuart Houston on 'Scurvy and Canadian Exploration'). But, thinking about capturing voices through the process of transcription, it's interesting that so many variants appear.

thuja occidentalis

As well as arbor vitae and ameda, which I talked about here, the northern white cedar is also known by its Linnaean nomenclature: thuja occidentalis. When I first saw this name (in the exhibition space at the Forest History Center) it struck me as very strange looking and I underlined it in my notebook for that reason:

Actually, thuja is a transliteration of a Greek term and it looks a lot less odd in the Greek script:

I suppose it's the j that makes the Latin version look strange. Once you realise that it's just a way of writing iota when it appears between two vowels, it doesn't seem so startling. But the Greek term itself has quite an odd history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was originally used as the name of an 'African tree' and appears with that reference in the Enquiry into Plants, by Theophrastus (c. 371- c.287 BC). And in Revelation 18.12, the passage prophesying the fall of Babylon, an adjectival form appears, referring to the same plant:

11. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:
12. The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,
13. And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

I think 'thyine wood' was burned for its smell and hence associated with sacrifices. (Quite a few sources connect thuia with thuein (to sacrifice)).

But, funnily enough, when the term thuja had become established in the Linnaean nomenclature to designate a particular genus, it turned out that the original thuia did not belong to that genus and the old 'African tree' is now known as tetraclinis articulata. (Well, I think that's the most recent name - at least it isn't called thuja articulata any more.) So the name has migrated away from its original reference and is now used in the names of five species, two from North America, three from East Asia, and none from North Africa.

northern white cedar

I've been away at a conference for a few days but am back at my desk today and thinking again about botany. I posted here about the way that plant names are entangled with human history and I mentioned some of the trees that are found in the forests of northern Minnesota. This is just a little story about the northern white cedar, which is native to the north-east of the US and the south-east of Canada with Minnesota at the western edge of its range.

This was the first North American tree to be introduced to Europe and that's largely, I think, because of its medicinal properties. When the French explorer, Jacques Cartier, came to Canada for the second time in 1536, he discovered - from Huron informants - that the foliage of the plant could be prepared and used as a cure for scurvy. (His crew were badly afflicted after the journey across the Atlantic.) As a result, he named it arbor vitae, tree of life, and took samples back to France, where it was cultivated.

In 1580, an English edition of Cartier's travels was published under the title: A shorte and briefe narration of the two nauigations and discoueries to the northwest partes called Newe Fraunce. I happen to have to access to this and took the chance to look at the narrative of the arbor vitae. It's interesting because Cartier cites a Native American name for the plant. He says: 'they told us, the vertue of that tree was, to heale any other disease: the tree is in their language called Ameda'. But it's worth looking at the orginal presentation of this passage. Below is a fasimile with the name ringed in red:

What really strikes me is the way the name, Ameda, is set off typographically. Whereas most of the text is in black-letter type, this term is in some kind of Roman font and in small caps with extra space around and between the letters. A theme I've returned to a lot throughout our discussions is that of transcription and this is, of course, a 16th-century transcription of a Native American term. The typographical difference doesn't help us to pronounce it but it does suggest another voice in the text and I've found myself trying to imagine what a voice rendered in well spaced Roman capitals might sound like! (Deep and booming? Or just subtly particular? Not what Cartier's own voice sounds like even when he tries to pronounce it correctly?) Actually, the word 'God', which appears right at the bottom of the page, is also set off typographically. But 'God' is just capitalised - it's in the same font as the rest of the text. Only the Native American term appears in a different font altogether.

So, here we have two names for the same tree but more than one voice is speaking in each of them. When Cartier names the tree arbor vitae, he is not inventing a term but drawing on a Christian name for the cross. I don't know if you've seen this site on the iconography of the cross. It's very good and it provides some references for the arbor vitae:

Peter and Linda Murray. 1998. Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture, pages 540-41.
William Wood Seymour. 1898. Cross in Tradition, History, and Art, pages 83-93.
Eva Wilson. 1994. Ornament 8000 Years: An Illustrated Handbook of Motifs, pages 135-38.

And, when we learn the Huron (?) name for the northern white cedar, we encounter it transcribed in Cartier's text, isolated from the language around it through the typographical choices made by the printer.

That's enough for now, I think. The northern white cedar has other names too, but I'll come to them another time. To finish, here's a picture of the plant itself (borrowed from wikimedia):

memory and nature

Once again, I really enjoyed your post (and also the comments it's attracted on your blog and on facebook). I'm keen to write about it this morning but, because it's a complex subject and it's only just opening up, I don't have a worked-out argument to express. I'm just going to jot down a few thoughts...

(1) There is certainly a tension between the haecitas of nature and the fact that natural organisms can also represent traces of historical events. It's true that the wisteria is simultaneously 'a flowering vine blooming out of the ground in the spring' and the trace of a certain kind of history.

(2) In a way the distinction is between recognising the wisteria as a symbol of a particular history and rigorously refusing to make it into a symbol, thus insisting upon its haecitas in the here and now. This idea of nature-as-symbol and nature-without-symbolism is interesting to me. There might be good reasons to want to see the wisteria in both ways.

(3) I have a feeling that this is one of those things where one can move between two perceptions of the same thing, both being possible but each always excluding the other. In this, it's like a Necker Cube:



Each of the box shapes in this image can be seen as either protruding from or intruding into the page. But, although you can see them in both ways, you can't see both at the same time.

(4) The impulse simply to be in the here-and-now is an important one - part of the reason that Buddhism has achieved some purchase in the west - but the impulse to look for the traces of history also seems important to me. Isn't it rather chilling to think that the here-and-now will simply cover up the past? Weren't we quite pleased when we found that the Minnesota Historical Society had put up signs to commemorate what was done to the Ojibwe at Great Sandy Lake and so trouble the sense that the lake is just a gloriously beautiful natural vista? (Although, actually, it occurs to me that, if one is standing there enjoying the 'beauty' of the lake, one might not be able to claim that one is simply being - 'enjoying the view' is a culturally constructed activity, I think.) This is why I like the image of the Necker Cube - wisteria is both presence-in-the-world and historical trace but maybe it can't be both to us at the same time.

(5) I love the fact that you've posted about Eudora Welty in this connection and I agree that she is absolutely fascinating. But, having tried to work out what I feel about this, I'm not sure that I fully understand her sense that places somehow retain their history quite apart from the functioning of human memory. I don't think my intitial response to a place - or at least to a place that seems 'natural' - involves a kind of intuitive discovery of its history but more the kind of aesetheticised here-and-now response that I've talked about in relation to Great Sandy Lake. Moving to the other view of the Necker cube - the view of the place as somewhere where history happened - involves some kind of mental work, some kind of learning - and then, once that's achieved, it can be difficult to go back to the other way of seeing it. Actually, I'm not quite sure about that last point - it's all too easy to slip back into an aestheticised way of seeing it but very difficult to experience it in that rather more unattached way as simply 'there'. (Also, I may not have understood Welty's ideas very well...)

(6) All this leads me to think about my focus on language and voices. The names of plants are quite clearly historical clues and so my interest in language perhaps conditions me to understand nature historically. But, again, it occurs to me that there is something very powerful to be done in thinking about the distinction between the named and the un-named. Would it be possible to detach the wisteria from its name once its name is known to you? I'm really struck by your allusion to Romeo and Juliet here. I'm also thinking about the way I felt as I kayaked through the woods immediately below Vekin's Dam and realised that I couldn't attach names to any of the plants around me.

(7) This is just coincidence really, but - as it happens - the Necker Cube appears in the designs of the mosaics at Pompeii:



Both images in this post come from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NeckerCube.html

Seven 'thoughts' on memory and nature :o) I don't if any of it makes much sense but that's what's in my mind right now...

wisteria and pine trees

I love your new post and it seems to me that there is a lot to think about here. For a start, you've reminded me of conversations we had in Minnesota about the way in which nature recolonises places long after the humans are gone, but - often - a nature changed by the passage of a human population. In the case of Rodney, the agent of nature's recolonisation is an introduced species, wisteria, and in the case of northern Minnesota (including the area round Mallard) it's the secondary growth, which is actually quite different from the primary growth that was there before. (Despite all the forests, Minnesota does not look as it did before the loggers passed through.) So our sense that nature entirely erases the traces of human habitation (and trauma) isn't quite right: if you can read 'nature's book', you can see those traces still in the way nature is changed by the 'passing through' of human populations. When nature reclaims a ghost town, it is itself changed.

I'm aways interested in how language, speech, and voices are connected with experiences of this kind and I think there is a lot of potential for thinking about that here. The plant we call wisteria must have changed its name many times as it passed from Asia into Europe and on into North America. I wonder what wisteria is called in Chinese? And does it appear in Chinese poetry? [...] Actually, I've just tried to answer my last question by doing a quick online search. And this took me to the website of James Cahill, Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at Berkeley. There he has a handout relating to a seminar on 'Poetic Painting in China'. It's a bit hard to interpret - more like a series of notes than a connected text - but it includes this:

Distant Mts. 4: "Scholars Gazing At Waterfall," 1630. Couplet (p. 37): "Pines and rocks are proper to old age; / Wisteria vines do not count the years."

I think there's something rather striking about that couplet, not least in the way it mentions both pines (the flora to be found around Mallard) and wisteria (the plant that is reclaiming Rodney), connecting both with the passing of time. It seems that, in English, the plant is named after a person, although there seems to be some doubt about which person. Having searched online, I've found that a lot of people say it was Caspar Wister (1761-1818), a physician and anatomist from Philadelphia.

As I happens, I've already assembled some material on the naming of plants in Minnesota. While I was kayaking, I was chastened a little by my total inability to recognise or name the plants that surrounded me. So, when we went to the Forest History Center near Grand Rapids, I was excited to see a big board in the exhibition space with the names of lots of the trees that you find in the area. I jotted them down in my notebook and, when I came back to Sheffield, did some research on some that seemed particularly interesting to me. I won't download a lot of information about them now - I'll save it for future postings - but a few that really caught my imagination were:

Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana)
American Basswood (Tilia americana)
Tamarack (Larix laricina)
Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis)

What do you think about collecting a series of 'botanical fragments' relating to the plants that surround our ghost towns? (By 'fragments' I mean fragments of text, of course.) Kayaköy is certainly being recolonised by plant life, all of which presumably has both Greek and Turkish names. Obviously Pompeii wasn't slowly reclaimed by nature - it was buried quickly in volcanic ash. But it occurs to me that the mosaics and paintings of Pompeii include images of plants and I wonder if they are just local ones or if they represent the resources of the empire? Anyway, just a thought - I'll post some more on this later.